Microsoft Office JS – Common Development issues

While working on MS Office JS add-ins I faced few issues.

In this blog posts am maintaining the list of issues which I have encounters and along with their resolutions.

Issue 1 : office-addin-debugging : command not found

You run the npm start command and recived the “command not found” error.

Reason : This is caused by missing “Office-addin-debugging” package. NPM looking for this package and can’t find it.

Solution : To install this package type and run npm install office-addin-debugging and that will solve this issue.

Issue 2 : Add-in Error : Sorry, we can’t load the add-in. Please make sure that you have network and/or Internet connectivity. Click “Try Again” Once you’re back online.

Reason : This error occurred when the add-ins are not able to find local server, or the it’s not able to locate the CA certificate.

Solution : Open a new command shell, go to your office add-ins root directory, type and run the below command.

npm run dev-server

Now open another command shell and go to same directory and run npm start.

npm start

and it will open the Word and you should be able to see working add-ins and task pane/

Issue 3 : How to convert images and document to Base64 format.

If you are new to MS Office JS development, this is the bit in which you will struggle a bit, to find to how to convert your images to document to base64

In Office JS add-ins you can’t insert JPG or documents directly, you require to convert them to Base64 string first.

Solution : If you are in Mac, simple run the below command and it will convert the file in to Base64 and export it in to a text file.

Cat filename.jpg | base64 > fileName.txr

I hope this blog post may save some of your troubleshooting time.

Please feel free to share and comment if you like this blog post.

Keep Learning

Aman Dhally